From ragnarok@pobox.com Sun Jun 10 20:06:57 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: raganok@intrex.net X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_1_3); 11 Jun 2001 03:06:57 -0000 Received: (qmail 60818 invoked from network); 11 Jun 2001 03:06:57 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 11 Jun 2001 03:06:57 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO intrex.net) (209.42.192.246) by mta2 with SMTP; 11 Jun 2001 03:06:57 -0000 Received: from Craig [209.42.200.34] by intrex.net (SMTPD32-5.05) id A5D4264F009C; Sun, 10 Jun 2001 23:07:00 -0400 Reply-To: To: Subject: RE: [lojban] selma'o Date: Sun, 10 Jun 2001 23:06:54 -0400 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) In-Reply-To: Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 X-eGroups-From: "Craig" From: "Craig" X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 7790 As a child, I knew that I could say "the lawyer is honest" or "a lawyer is honest" but not "of lawyer is honest" before I knew that that was because the and a are articles while of is a preposition. I got it right, too. I'm learning lojban. trying to learn the language without the selma'o, since they confuse me. I'm doing just fine, for someone who's only been at it for less than one month - it took me almost a year before I could write poetry in Spanish (and it was even worse than what I've attempted in lojban.). I think a native speaker would know that they could say "lo vecnu cu melbi" or "le vecnu cu melbi" but not "mi vecnu cu melbi" as the same structure grammatically before they had even heard of selma'o. Now of course "mi vecnu cu melbi" is gramatical lojban. but it means "The salesman thinks I'm beautiful" rather than "the salesman is beautiful" - a distinction they'd pick up pretty quick. Now as for your assertion that you can't learn lojban. by imitation, how would we ever have native speakers? It's bound to be possible, the language is more learnable than others (at least I'm picking it up faster than I picked up Spanish and when I tried Quechua after a month I was able to mostly conjugate verbs and knew around five words - I was doing badly enough that I gave it up, which I am not for lojban.). -----Original Message----- From: Jorge Llambias [mailto:jjllambias@hotmail.com] Sent: Monday, June 11, 2001 2:54 AM To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] selma'o la kreig cusku di'e > Why do we need selma'o? I've been learning better by ignoring them, How do you manage to write any grammatical sentence by ignoring selma'o? Words in a given selma'o are all the words that can occupy a given position in a sentence. For example, you can't use {mi} as a gadri, that's why {mi} and {le} belong to different selma'o. >and I'm >sure if we had native speakers then when they were little babies learning >lojban., all selma'o would do is confuse them. Of course, little babies would not learn about selma'o until they go to school, just as we don't teach little babies about verbs and nouns and articles and prepositions. >They probably wouldn't even >learn them! They don't seem to serve any real purpose, either. Is there >something I'm missing, or was it just "Hey, let's put the cmavo in these >groups we don't need for no reason!" It would be great if you can learn Lojban just from imitation, ignoring what selma'o are for, and still use the language correctly, it would show that the language is quite robust. mu'o mi'e xorxes _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Yahoo! Groups Sponsor To unsubscribe, send mail to lojban-unsubscribe@onelist.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.